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Comment by the_ancient | Hacker News Reader

Only in the minds of Corporate lawyers is that true, the few cases that have gone all way to judgment often side with the employee unless the work product is directly related to their job function. Most of these cases also settle out of court long before they get to judgment because the soulless company bankrupts the former employee with bullshit legal costs

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This is not true. For example, take a look at DSC Communications Corp. v. Evan Brown, or DDB Tech v. MLB Advanced Media or Medsphere v. Shreeve.

In DSC, the court ruled that Alcatel owned the employee's thoughts that had not yet been committed to writing. (See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/12/alcatel_owns_us_empl...).

In DDB, the court found that Schlumberger (the oilfield services company) owned a baseball simulator written by an employee. (See http://www.finnegan.com/Publications/federalcircuit/FCCDetai...)

In Medsphere, the CTO of the company was sued for releasing the source code to their application as open source on Sourceforge. (See http://www.informationweek.com/medsphere-settles-lawsuit-wit...)

It may be only "corporate lawyers" who agree with the policies, but those lawyers tend to be very persuasive in front of judges.

DDB is specifically limited to patents not copyright which is what we are discussing here.

DSC Communications Corp. v. Evan Brown is more relevant, and highlights while I will never live in Texas.... But I should have also said that most of these employment contracts are governed by State law, not Federal law so the amount of bullshit the companies are allowed to get away with is highly varies from state to state. Texas is the worse when it comes to employee protections. DSC would have been laughed out of court here.

Medsphere v. Shreeve was settled out of court so has no bearing on this discussion.

DDB is a patent cases, and, therefore therefore isn't interpreting the "work for hire" provision of copyright law -- the issue isn't whether an employment contract could transfer exclusive rights to the employer, but whether the employer was entitled to treat the work as a "work for hire" by policy (in copyright, there's a pretty important distinction between a transfer of exclusive rights by contract and a work being a "work for hire" where the original copyright is with the hiring party, this distinction does not exist in patent law); Medsphere wasn't an IP case at all, it was a case about breach of fiduciary duty by a corporate officer; and DSC/Alcatel involves a case where employee conduct at the time evidence that the employee thought that the work was within the scope of an inventions clause (including asking bosses for a waiver of the inventions clause), even though in court assertions were made (but, from what I can find, weakly supported) that would indicate the work was outside the scope. But, also, most of the reporting is around a "duty to disclose inventions" clause, and none indicates anything about work for hire in copyright -- its not at all clear from anything I can find on the case that it addresses scope of employment/work for hire issues, just scope of an enforceable contract clause which may effect a transfer of ownership.

So none of these cases seem to be on point here.

I worked at Rackspace from 2007-2013 and have been acquainted with them for even longer. The notion of a "soulless company" bankrupting a former employee is ridiculous in the context of the Rackspace way of doing business. It goes against the Rackspace Core Values. Many Rackers have left the company to found companies of their own and I've never heard of any legal fight with any of these folks.

There aren't many 5,000+ employee companies with OSS policies this friendly.

I did not mean to imply they were a soulless company, I love rackspace, I am a (very small) customer of theirs never had anything less than a great experience.

However my experience with corporate legal at any company is the people therein have complete lack of humanity or decency. They have sold their souls for BMW and a 6-7 figure salary.

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